Notes on the Text

This book is a synthesis of three years of collaborative, ethnographic work conducted through a project funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation: “Kids’ Informal Learning with Digital Media.”

Early in the planning of this book, we made a decision not to structure it as a traditional edited volume, nor as a book singly written by a project principal investigator. Instead, this book was written in a highly distributed collaborative process that aimed to integrate both the ethnographic material and the analytic insights of all the project’s researchers involved at the time of its writing. We thought this approach was most in line with the spirit of collaborative, interdisciplinary inquiry that has guided our project from its inception. Each chapter has one or more lead authors who took responsibility for the writing, but every chapter incorporated material and input from a wide range of coauthors and the case studies that they represented. In line with this stance, we use a collective voice to describe this work, even in chapters with only one lead author. We did not always reach complete consensus on all aspects of this book, but there was agreement among the coauthors that we would take collective ownership.

Although Mizuko Ito took the lead in the writing of this book, the three other principal investigators, Peter Lyman, Michael Carter, and Barrie Thorne, provided indispensable leadership and support for this project. In addition, we have integrated ethnographic material from former project members, who are named as contributors to this book. The full range of people who have contributed to this project and this book are mentioned in the Acknowledgments.

The case studies and approaches that the coauthors brought to the writing have been diverse, but we have agreed on certain representational conventions to provide some consistency in our writing:

• Unlike in more traditional forms of ethnography, the descriptions in this book draw from a wide range of case studies conducted by a large team of ethnographers. When a research participant is quoted or identified, we indicate which case study the material came from and the name of the fieldworker who conducted the interview or the observation. We use short identifiers for the studies so as not to clutter the text. Full descriptions and titles of each of the case studies are included in the chapter on Media Ecologies.
• The various case studies were conducted using very different data-collection methodologies, and we have varying degrees of access to contextual information about our participants. In every case, if we know the information, we have indicated age, gender, and what each participant self-identified as his or her racial/ethnic identity. If this information is not indicated, it means that we did not know the information on that particular subject because of the constraints of the particular case study. For example, in many of the studies that focused on online interest groups, interviews were conducted over the phone or through online chat. In most cases, we derived this information from self-reports in background questionnaires we administered in advance of most of our formal interviews. Although we do not see race as a key analytic category in our work, there are times when we think it is relevant to our description, and we thought that if racial or ethnic identity were to be mentioned for some number of participants, then we needed to be symmetrical in our treatment and indicate racial identity for all respondents for whom we did have this information.
• We have used pseudonyms in most cases when referring to our research participants. In many but not all cases these pseudonyms were chosen by the participants themselves. In the case of some media producers, these names correspond with their creator identities or screen names in their respective interest groups, an approach that we think honors the reputations and investments of time that many of our participants work very hard to develop. When participants specifically requested it, we have used their screen names or their real-life names. When real names or screen names are used, we indicate this by an endnote in the text.

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